THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
EDITED BY CARLA MULFORD
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS c·AM~=~.U~!L.sJ.ItlRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge companion to Benjamin Franklin I edited by Carla Mulford. p. cm. - (Cambridge companions to American studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-52I-87I34-I (hardback) I. Franklin, Benjamin, I706-I790 - Political and social views. 2. Franklin, Benjamin, I706-I790 - Knowledge and learning. 3. Franklin, Benjamin, I706-I790 - Influence. 4. Statesmen - United States - Biography. 5. Scientists - United Stares - Biography. 6. United Stares - lntellectual life - I 8th century. 1. Mulford, Carla, I 9 5 5- II. Tide: Companion to Benjamin Franklin. III. Series. E302.6.F8C2I8 2008 973.3092-dc22 (B] 2008033470
ISBN 978-o-52I-87I34-I hardback ISBN 978-o-52I-69I86-4 paperback
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FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment
1 Franklin and his contemporaries may never have seen themselves as members of a unified intellectual movement, but they did believe that their world was historically distinct in a number of ways. The term reason, contested as it was in the eighteenth century, widely served to signify this sense of distance from earlier periods. The same is true for the name, Benjamin Frank/in, which came to stand for all sorts of things but almost always symbolized the promise or threat of a new age of human autonomy. "Had Franklin drawn lightning from the clouds [three hundred years ago]," Thomas Paine noted in The Age of Reason (1794), "it would have been at the hazard of expiring for it in the flames." 1 Paine implied that in the Middle Ages, Franklin's scientific discoveries - his disenchantment of nature - would have challenged the authority of the Catholic church, and he might have been burned at the stake. Yet in his own enlightened times, Franklin was seen as a representative man of his age, and his discoveries and inventions symbolized social and political revolutions of the highest magnitude, as in Turgot's popular witticism, "[Franklin] seized the lightning from the sky, and the sceptre from tyrants." 2 Modem readers are duly suspicious of such utopian pronouncements. In hindsight, they recognize that the Enlightenment never existed as a homoge nous set of ideas or as a coherent ideological program. Instead, opposing understandings of enlightened thought and action coexisted, not always peacefully. Different schools and creeds formed rigid antagonisms, surpris ing coalitions, new mixtures. The Enlightenment was obviously not the sum total of its constituent parts - empiricism, deism, moral-sense philoso phy, economic liberalism, republicanism, revolutionary utopianism, and so forth - because these parts don't add up. Nevertheless, we can speak of the Enlightenment once we recognize that under this heading, disparate forces interacted in a common attempt to redefine the meaning of human reason.
77 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment, in other words, did not exist as a set of shared beliefs Common-sense philosophy combined the democratic and the critical and convictions, but it produced shared ways of arguing a point as rational. aspects of enlightened reason. lt argued that truth is always plain. Peo Thus, whatever ideological stance it took, enlightened reason always ple require no superior intellect to understand what is true. Nevertheless, it regarded itself as a critical, democratic, and constructive faculty. Reason was held that most people are actually unable to discern pl;iin truth, because was considered a critical faculty because it attempted to free human under they have never learned to trust their own senses. Instead, they unthinkingly standing from d6xa or opinion. That is, reason freed human understanding subscribe to established opinions (what contemporaries called "prejudices") from "that Assent, which we give to any Proposition as true, of whose Truth or to the doctrines canonized by powerful institutions. Franklin reacted to yet we have no certain Knowledge" (John Locke).3 Hence, to exercise one's this dilemma in the same manner as did John Locke and Immanuel Kant: he reason in an enlightened manner did not simply mean to speak the truth; it maintained that all received knowledge could and must be tested empirically. meant to eliminate a falsely established belief. Even more: to exercise one's Knowledge needed to be examined by one's own senses and reason and not reason meant to speak and act against all authorities that had an interest in accepted as what other people teil us or what we can read in books, even if perpetuating falsehood. To exercise one's reaso~meant to distrust the offi thncP hnnlrc nrPrP u.rrittPn hu crrP"'.lt" nhiJncnnhPrc.:. ,,... inctP!'.lrl nf cimnlv hPfiP11------·· ------.1 o----- r------r------r " cial pronouncements of ruling powers and elites. Along these lines, to read ing that lightning is an articulation of God's wrath (as eminent theologians Greek or to be a good rhetorician did not make a person more reasonable asserted) we need to examine lightning with our own eyes - and we will come but more powerful. Consequently, when Franklin proposed the solution to to different conclusions. Transferred to the political realm, this "courage to a specific problem in physics (in a letter to John Perkins), he concluded: think for oneself," as Kant called it, had far-reaching consequences.4 Sud "If my Hypothesis is not the Truth itself, it is least as naked: For I have denly, no power on earth was exempt from critical scrutiny. not ... disguis'd my Nonsense in Greek, cloth'd it in Algebra, or adorn'd it Franklin symbolized this democratic aspect of enlightened reason in more with Fluxions" (P 4: 442). than one way. When he claimed that it is more important to know what Enlightened knowledge, Franklin implies, exists independently of the a man can do than where he comes from, he was essentially talking about "schools," independently, that is, of scholastic learning and, in this case, himself, both as a self-made man and as an American. Franklin's popularity mathematical training. In Franklin's times, to be reasonable did not mean among European (especially French) intellectuals in the eighteenth century to be more intelligent or more learned than the next man, but it meant to had everything to do with his marginal status as a colonial. After all, there free oneself from dogmatic beliefs. Thus, the exercise of one's reason was was something inherently provincial in the Enlightenment's conviction that not simply an act of confirmation. On the contrary, people like Franklin truth is a matter of common sense and free public deliberation, and not a almost habitually suspected that official censure is always directed against matter of divine inspiration, social standing, or scholastic training. Franklin truth. Looking back on his youthful conversion to deism (that is, to a post shrewdly exploited this topos when he went to Versailles dressed as a back Christian brand of enlightened religion), he noted in The Autobiography woodsman. In this manner, Dr. Franklin, the beaver-hatted member of the that he took this step because "[s]ome Books against Deism feil into my Royal Medical Society in Paris, came to embody the worldwide common Hands ... lt happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite contrary ality of enlightened reason: an American, a wilderness philosopher, solves to what was intended by them" (A rr3-14, emphasis added). Not just the some of the most difficult problems of European science - what better proof veracity but the ill repute of deism convinced him to become "a thorough for the universality of human reason! Deist." Far from being a merely affirmative or contemplative faculty, enlight Enlightened reason was not based on wisdom, tradition, or authoritative ened reason saw and presented itself as a force that actively shapes and institutionalization. lt is in this sense that enlightened reason was considered improves human living conditions. Enlightened reason is thus a constructive not only a critical but also a democratic faculty - even though that was not faculty. In this view, to understand nature ultimately means to domesticate the term used by Franklin and his contemporaries. Indeed, the word democ nature. And to domesticate nature - to seize the lightning from the sky - racy for most of them had a pejorative meaning, connoting demagoguery means to construct new possibilities and environments for human life in and mob-rule. Instead, they spoke of democratic reason as common sense, the service of communal, perhaps even universal, well-being. Enlightened a sense of reason common to all people, regardless of social status and ideologies may fight over the actual features of these rational environments educational background. and over the ways to get there, but they share a fundamental optimism
78 79 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment
concerning the malleability of human society (though not concerning the the dominance of utilitarian thought in Franklin's version of the Enlighten goodness of human nature). In this sense, there is an inherent connection ment. Useful is a key term in his writings. "What signifies Philosophy that between Franklin's lightning rods and his establishment of lending libraries does not apply to some Use?" he asked in a 1760 letter to Mary Stevenson (making education accessible to all people, not just to a small coterie of (P 9: 251). Even natural catastrophes were functional in this manner. Writ learned men), between his experiments in electricity and his various political ing three years after the disastrous earthquake of Lisbon, Franklin reflected projects, from his vision of a Greater Britain in the l75os to his advocacy that such catastrophes are ultimately beneficial to human knowledge and of American independence in the l77os and on to the federalist constitu human happiness: tionalism of his final years. In all these cases, human thought and action [A] great number of strata of different kinds are brought up to day, and a great are supposed to do more than understand and praise an existing, divinely variety of useful materials put into our power, which would otherwise have ordained order of things. Human thought and action now exhibit their remained eternally concealed from us. So that what has been usually looked divine origins - as most enlightened thinkers believed - by devising projects upon as a ruin suffered by this part of the universe, was, in reality, only a nf c;;:plf-imnrrnrPmPnt 1'.AnrP th-:rin ~nunthPr A m,o.rir'"ln f'ru1nrlPr Pr'1nlrlin h„c ------r- - . ------· -·------; ~------~------, ------...... preparation, or means oi renciering rne earrn more iir ior use, mure l:apau:1: ui come to represent this enlightened paradigm, in which reason no longer being to mankind a convenient and comfortable habitation. (P 7: 3 57) moves from Platonic astonishment to pious trust but actively distrusts the necessity of things as they are. This kind of reason confidently works to Franklin's optimism should not blind us to the fact that almost all enlight construct new worlds for human happiness. ened philosophies were troubled by the problem of usefulness, because the rational utility of cataclysmic changes, both natural and intellectual, is not easily established or defended. If human reason is at core a critical fac II ulty, one that engages in questioning traditional commitments and obli We could stop here and come away with a heroic image of Franklin and the gations, what prevents reason from becoming a purely destructive force, Enlightenment. However, Franklin was not born a paragon of the American doing away with time-tested checks on human depravity and eliminating Enlightenment but had to be made one, in a long process of interpretation necessary consolations? This was the question famously asked by Edmund and appropriation. Thus, if we want to understand Franklin in his own Burke in Refiections an the Revolution in France (1790). When Burke pub times, we should be wary of overtly homogenizing readings of his life and lished his book, numerous competing answers were already in circulation. works. To a certain degree, even the contemporaries had their doubts. John Among the most popular was the moral-sense philosophy of the Scottish Adams - no unprejudiced observer of Franklin's career, to be sure - wrote Enlightenment. Francis Hutcheson, for example, had realigned enlightened to Benjamin Rush on April 4, 1790: "The History of our Revolution will reason with traditional notions of moral legitimacyin Inquiry Concerning be one continued Lye from one end to the other. The essence of the whole Moral Good and Evil (1725). To Hutcheson, human beings have an inner will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical Rod smote the Earth and out sprang sense - an unerring feeling - of what is proper and true. Thus, according General Washington."5 to Hutcheson, our own emotions, if freed from authoritarian influences and Adams's sarcasm draws our attention to the fundamentally historical social affectations, are the surest way of determining whether a proposition character of the American Enlightenment and Franklin's involvement in or an action is reasonable or not. If unadulterated, such intuitions provide it. Franklin's biography and the history of the early republic are revealingly seif-evident truths, truths that all feeling creatures must agree on, no matter similar in this regard, because in both cases the process of self-making was what their brainpower, social status, or education. far more diversified and far more contingent than popular versions suggest. In an argumentative pattern typical of most Enlightenment debates, Adam Franklin's enlightenment can be described as a dynamic process rather than Smith refined this idea by criticizing it. In Theory of Moral Sentiments an unwavering commitment to a specific political ideology. This does not (1759), Smith objected to Hutcheson's conviction that a given action is mean, however, that his philosophy was erratic, nor that it was histori self-evidently moral if it is accompanied by genuinely delightful sensations. cally idiosyncratic. Behind all positions he took and behind all successive Smith rejected this idea not only because people can feel honestly good roles he played in his day, we can trace a fairly consistent set of intellectual when doing bad things (taking revenge, for example), but also because a dispositions. Concerning these dispositions, it is difficult to argue against single individual is never capable of surveying all possible results of his or
80 81 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment
her actions. What is reasonable to the best of my knowledge - and what criticism and pragmatic affirmation was most obvious in Franklin's concept my emotions honestly approve of - may still have dire consequences for of religion. my environment or for myself. Nevertheless, Smith wanted to hold fast to The basic stance of Franklin's theology can be summarized as follows: the concept of a seif-evident, non-elitist rationality. Therefore he concluded he questioned the epistemological validity of revealed religion but affirmed that an individual can act reasonably by disregarding his own immediate its political necessity. At times, this attitude came close to claiming that interests and thus by putting himself in the position of what he called an the major good of religious faith is to keep the ignorant masses from sloth "impartial spectator." In other words, the enlightened individual, as envi and insurrection. 6 But such Voltairean resentment of the canaille was not a sioned by Smith, transcends subjectivity to assess the causal effects of his or central feature of Franklin's view of religion. True, his ideas of human nature her chosen conduct. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments regarded the social were frequently closer to Hobbes than to Locke: "If Men are so wicked as consequentiality of an action as the prime indicator of its morality (without we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?" he having to resort to institutionalized ethics and without leaving the question asked in an anonymous letter from 1757 (P 7: 749).7 Nevertheless, like .-..• m,..,„..,J;t-u t-.-.. ,.....,...,,.,.;,...;A.nC'i:omA.t-;n.nC'\ Tn '-mirh'C' uiPnr thP mPt"".l-C11h-iPrt"ilTP ...... ~ ...... / ...... - ...... y.._„_.„...,.""- ...... _...... „ ...... „ ...... „„ ...... ,. -„- ...... „ ... „„„„„ ~ ·--··, ------,----· - !!1-0~!l"!l!ighrl"!'Prf wrirPr~,Fr:>nklin rPnrtPrt to strf>~sthf> constructive as!'ects public good became the measurement of rational practice and the limit of of faith over its prohibitive functions. Like Locke in The Reasonableness of individual well-being. Christianity ( l 69 5 ), Franklin praised traditional forms of religious worship When Smith called on enlightened individuals to aspire to the meta because they provided a widely accepted foundation for social morality. The subjective perspective of an impartial spectator, he prepared for various same, he thought, could not be said about some of the more innovative and later developments in enlightened thought. Thus, his critique of popular radical forms (scientific or natural) of enlightened religion. Accordingly, in moral-sense philosophy came full circle in Jeremy Bentham's lntroduction The Autobiography he recounted how his conduct toward friends and family to the Principles of Moralsand Legislation (1789), where Bentham defined deteriorated after his conversion to deism. In turn, fellow deists wronged the principle of utility as a form of self-observation that qualifies subjective him without showing signs of bad conscience. In The Autobiography he needs and actions by weighing them against collective needs and actions. concluded, "I began to suspect that this Doctrine [of deism] tho' it might be Bentham advised enlightened statesmen to reorganize society so as to achieve true, was not very useful" (A 114). "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," a formula he adapted from lt is tempting to read this sentence as a victory of utilitarian (constructive) Hutcheson's An lnquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue reason over deist (critical) reason. Yet despite his realization that deism was (1725). morally deficient, Franklin refused to reconvert to any of the socially more lt is helpful to view Franklin's concern with utility in light of these useful forms of Protestant Christianity. Instead, he designed an entirely new other theorists and philosophers. Like Smith and Bentham, he thought that theology, which he thought would do justice to both his critical and his Hutcheson's understanding of reason as an intuitive and emotional faculty social-utilitarian interests. His early attempts at biblical iconoclasm can be provided a solution far too simple. Even so, Franklin shared Hutcheson's read in this way, as when he devised new and more enlightened versions commitment to a seif-evident, non-elitist, indeed democratic rationality. of the Lord's Prayer (P l: 99, ro1ff.) or of the first chapter of the Book Refusing to believe in the popular eighteenth-century dream of transpar of Job (Smyth 7: 432). Even more outspoken are his religious proposals in ent emotions, he nevertheless upheld the idea that reason is common to The Autobiography, where he offered a multi-denominational catalogue of all people and that the task of enlightened politics therefore is to ensure principles said to contain "the Essentials of every known Religion," while "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." In revolutionary America being "free of everything that might shock the Professors of any Religion" and the early republic, this utilitarian ideal proved particularly attrac (A 162). Ultimately, this basic version of human belief was closer to deism tive, because its calculus was pragmatic rather than idealistic: it didn't than to traditional Christian forms of worship, but it attempted to make claim to produce universal happiness and equality but only to construct critical reason socially useful. the most favorable conditions for pursuing both. Thus, utilitarianism was On the whole, what Franklin presented was a natural religion with the able to accommodate conflicting interests in a heterogeneous society. Most additional assumption that God created human beings not only as ratio importantly, it was able to criticize established institutions of church and nal but as moral beings. Thus, similar to earlier enlightened notions of a state without denying their social efficacy. This double attitude of radical non-institutionalized, popular ur-form of Christianity, such as in Locke's
82 83 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment
Reasonableness of Christianity, Franklin's universal religion claimed to be Franklin went on to calculate that Whitefield's voice could be heard by comprehensible to all people without specialized training or authoritative 30,000 people simultaneously, if each person in his audience took up two exegesis. lt was a seif-evident faith. More importantly, it was a democratic square feet. The author of Poor Richard's Almanack - himself a master of faith, and this not only because the people at !arge could believe in it, but modern mass-communication - apparently recognized his own kind here. because the anti-schismatic character of this faith made possible the close While Franklin might have found little truth in Whitefield's doctrine, he was cohabitation of widely different kinds of people. In this sense, Franklin's so impressed by the preacher's savoir faire that he immediately responded enlightened theology aimed not at establishing an unrivaled dogmatic truth to the sermon's appeal and donated money to Whitefield's orphanage in but at organizing a peacefully inhabitable social environment in the face of Georgia - not, however, without securing for himself the printing rights for religious diversity. the sermons of George Whitefield, with whom he now entered into a "civil lt is no coincidence that this idea took center stage in the writings of Friendship" beyond religious differences (A 178). an American colonial. Like most American founders, Franklin was deeply This episode points to a central dilemma in Franklin's utilitarian view rrinrPrnPrl urith nrrihlPm< nrioPrl <>nrl oolntiono 0110-
84 85 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment
eighteenth century, was meant to institutionalize, as consistently as possible, (A 124). Exactly this kind of pragmatic easiness and freedom led Franklin meta-subjective forms of communication. The Autobiography comments on to praise industry not as a virtue in itself, but as something that helped the communicative guidelines of this club: him to construct a controlled self-image with which he could impress his neighbors. Thus, in The Autobiography he describes how he "took care Our Debates were ... to be conducted in the sincere Spirit of Enquiry after not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appear Truth, without Fondness for Dispute, or Desire of Victory; and to prevent Warmth, all Expressions of Positiveness in Opinion, or of direct Contradiction, ances of the Contrary" (A 125). Not even narcissism seems to motivate were after some time made contraband and prohibited under small pecuniary this search for moral perfection, but a will to dominance and profit: "Thus Penalties. (A r 17) being esteem'd an industrious thriving young Man, and paying duly for what 1 bought, the Merchants who imported Stationary solicited my Cus There is an irony here: Franklin's communicative reason appears almost like tom, others propos'd supplying me with Books, and 1 went on swimmingly" a parlor game, which, like all forms of competition, has winners and losers. (A 126). Once more, we need to ask: cui bono? Who profits from this kind of reason? lt is P::isy tn Sf'f' why sncinlngist M::ix Weher, one of the first modern Franklin provided an answer in The Autobiography, when he slyly praised analysts of the capitalist work ethic, chose Benjamin Franklin to illustrate the "Socratic Method," defined as a way of debating that avoids opinionated what he meant by the word "rationalization": a "psycho-physical habitus" or antagonistic expressions, only to add that this method helped him to that subdues even the most private strivings to the requirements of material obtain "Victories that neither my seif nor my Cause always deserved" (A 6 5 ). success.9 This is a very widespread criticism of Franklin and of the American But what type of reason brings undeserved, or unreasonable, victories? There Enlightenment, if not of American society, at !arge: freedom from external are various occasions in Franklin's writings when this question becomes authorities enables the enlightened individual "to find or make a Reason for pertinent, as when the narrator of The Autobiography teHs us how he relaxed everything one has a mind to do," especially for getting rieb at another's - his rational (i.e., vegetarian) diet after he smelled fried codfish in Rhode and one's own - expense. Island: Indeed, there is no denying that the Lockean tenet of individual self Hitherto 1 had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food; and on creation enables the human subject to treat itself like an object. One possi this Occasion, 1 consider'd ... the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok'd ble resu!t is "internal colonization": emancipated from external authorities - Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might above all providence and chance - the enlightened individual turns into its justify the Slaughter. All this seem'd very reasonable. But 1 had formerly been own master and monitor, so that individual happiness quickly becomes an a great Lover of Fish, and when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt imperative. 10 Not only financial success or 'social reputation but also spiritual admirably weil. 1 balanc'd some time between Principle & Inclination: till 1 fulfillment, aesthetic receptivity, and sexual well-being can now be pursued recollected, that when the Fish were opened, 1 saw smaller Fish taken out of with economic precision and methodical rigor. Such rigor marks Franklin's their Stomachs: Then, thought 1, if you eat one another, 1 don't see why we model for the "bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection" mayn't eat you. So 1 din'd upon Cod very heartily and continu'd to eat with (A 148). Franklin's model equips the moral subject with a catalogue of thir other People, retuming only now and than. [sie] occasionally to a vegetable teen easy-to-follow mies, whose conscientious observance promises nothing Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables less absolute self-identity. As autonomous being, Franklin implies, one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do. (A 87-88) than an you can be happy - in fact, you have to be happy, because if you're not, This seems to take enlightened utilitarianism to the extreme: a self-serving you're a self-produced failure. reasoning legitimizing whatever appears advantageous to the individual. According to modern critics of the Enlightenment, such happiness Similarly, Franklin's perfectly enlightened treatise on A Modest Enquiry demands a price higher than self-mastery: it requires that all moral, aesthetic, into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency (1729) looks a bit dietetic, and sexual needs be systematically subordinated to the laws of util less enlightened - or its enlightenment takes on a new meaning - when ity. This "dialectic of Enlightenment," as Max Horkheimer and Theodor we read about the resu!ts of this treatise: "My Friends ... who conceiv'd W. Adorno called it, threatens to turn the enlightened promise of emanci 1 had been of some Service, thought fit to reward me, by employing me pation against itself. Indeed, Franklin teils us that in practicing his thirteen in printing the Money, a very profitable Jobb, and a great Help to me" character-building measures, he had to refrain not only from openly amoral
86 87 FRANK KELLETER Franklin and the Enlightenment actions but also from jokes and puns. A statement like this seems to suggest young; his temper ever serene. Science, that never grows grey, was always that enlightened reason makes short work of the imagination and of other his mistress. He was never without an object."'5 sensual pleasures. Ever since Romanticism, this has been a staple argument So if we decide to follow Weber in seeing Franklin as the embodiment in critiques of the Enlightenment. of "innerworldly asceticism," we at least need to explain what (or whom) Again, however, it is useful to place Franklin and his contemporaries in Paine was referring to - and what it could possibly mean when Franklin's their historical contexts. True, the enlightened skepticism toward received Autobiography defined itself against "the lives of ... absurd monastic self opinions contained a critique of poiesis - of human image-making - itself. tormentors" (A 138). Attempting such explanations, we will probably find But Locke himself did not criticize the sensuality of imaginative art but that what looks like a dark dialectic of self-mastery and self-denial was fre rather art's role in ascribing a supernatural aura to political and clerical quently motivated by the American Enlightenment's pragmatic tendency to power. The Enlightenment's campaign was not against imagination and negotiate between competing rational claims on human happiness. Thus, it fantasy but against endowing worldly institutions with an imaginary and may be more than just a sign of self-discipline when people go to the gym f:mt::istic::il nimhns. or kPP!1 cloctor's ::irrointmPnts for rP!1;1il::ircheck-urs. Nothing less than love On the whole, almost all enlightened philosophies agreed that affections of life may be at the bottom of such rational measures employed by people and passions are essential parts of human reason, not its binary opposites. who are, as Franklin was, intensely aware of their dependence on a mor The utilitarian search for "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" tal mind and body. What we are in need of, then, is a reading of Franklin's may have been fraught with all sorts of practical and mathematical prob Enlightenment that can account for the (aesthetic) pleasures of his writings - lems, but it adopted a firmly anti-ascetic position, as did Franklin when for his humorous styles and sly ironies, even self-mockeries - without deny he ate codfish. II Similarly, the oft-discussed pursuit of happiness, as envi ing their utilitarian basis, but also without reducing them to generic examples sioned by Locke and later Thomas Jefferson, was explicitly not about the of purely didactic wit. By allowing Franklin tobe interpreted in the context of target-oriented hunt for one specific object whose possession promises final his own time, we would gain a fuller understanding about having a sense of well-being. I2 Echoing Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding humor, and a mindset, different from our own. I6 (1689/r700), Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that "the desire of bettering our condition" is "a desire which ... comes with us Notes from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave."13 Pleasure means searching and activity, not ownership and rest. According to this I. Thomas Paine, Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of logic, Adam Ferguson concluded in An Essay on the History of Civil Society America, 1995), 699. 2. Quoted in Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the (1767): "Happiness arises more from the pursuit, than from the attainment American Experiment and a Free Society (New York: George Braziller, 1965), of any end whatsoever."I4 53· Not surprisingly, enlightened literature tended to sensualize reason itself, 3. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch frequently using sexual metaphors to describe acts of thinking and deliber (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 44. ation. More surprisingly for modern readers, these rational pleasures were 4. Immanuel Kant, Werkausgabe, 12 vols., ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am often personified in none other than Benjamin Franklin, whom many have Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 5: 283. 5. Quoted in: Joseph J. Ellis, "Habits of Mind and an American Enlightenment," conceived as a prophet of bourgeois self-discipline and capitalist profit American Quarterly 28 (1976): 150-64, quotation at 150. The heterogeneity of hunting. Thomas Paine, for one, found fault with people who seek happiness Franklin's career and reputation is described in Gordon Wood, The American only in the enjoyment or production of material goods - "[t]he mere man of ization of Benjamin Frank/in (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). According to pleasure ... and the mere drudge" - contrasting their doomed lives with the Wood, Franklin took on many successive roles in his lifetime: gentleman, British example of those who will be truly happy in old age because their interest in imperialist, patriot, diplomat, American. philosophy and science provides them with "a continual source of tranquil 6. Compare Franklin's Letter to --, December 13, 1757 (P 7: 294). 7. For a more open affirmation of Hobbes, see Franklin's 1737 letter to James pleasure." Romantics may consider the concept of "tranquil pleasure" a Logan (P 2: 184) and his 1782 letter to Joseph Priestley (P 37: 444). contradiction in terms, but it is striking to note that Paine selected Franklin, 8. Compare Frank Kelleter, Amerikanische Aufklärung: Sprachen der Rationalität of all people, to represent this sensual rationality: "[H]is mind was ever im Zeitalter der Revolution (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 295-310.
88 89 FRANK KELLETER
9. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 518. 10. For "internal colonization," see Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 2: 489. l r. On enlightened sensualism, compare Kelleter, Amerikanische Aufklärung, 37-40. 12. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 251-57. 13. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, et al. (Oxford University Press, 1976), 34r. 14. Quoted in: Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: Val. 2: The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1996), 339. 15. Paine, Collected Writings, 77r. 16. I wish to thank Christy Hosefelder, Alexander Starre, and Daniel Stein for assis t::.nrP ::incl rritin11P
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